


Acupressure and Amethyst

by ladyshadowdrake



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, Body Paint, Cuddling, Feels, Fluff, Las Vegas, M/M, Massage, Short fic collection, Shower Sex, Wedding Bells, before and after Bucky, before and after Steve, or at least a wedding Elvis, post winter soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 21:25:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3544322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyshadowdrake/pseuds/ladyshadowdrake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two separate and unrelated stories for the Steve/Bucky spring fling exchange!</p><p>Prompts:</p><p>Acupressure: </p><p>Bucky used to tell him he thought too much and would throw his back out carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. It was a sort of pretext he used, something he mentioned before putting his wide hands on Steve's slender shoulders and back, to get Steve to let him massage away some of his pain. Steve had always been too proud to admit how his scoliosis made him ache. But those wide hands didn't stop finding their way onto his shoulders even after he became wide and broad himself and his spine straightened.</p><p>Amethyst: </p><p>With marriage equality finally spreading to Nevada, it was only a matter of time until a same-sex couple wound up accidentally married in Las Vagas. Steve and Bucky just never thought it would be them. To be fair, nobody else really expected it either, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're surprised." <br/>If this includes drawing on each other's faces like Ross and Rachael I may love you forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Acupressure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [I_Dont_KnowWhatImDoing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Dont_KnowWhatImDoing/gifts).



> Here's the prompt: 
> 
> Bucky used to tell him he thought too much and would throw his back out carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. It was a sort of pretext he used, something he mentioned before putting his wide hands on Steve's slender shoulders and back, to get Steve to let him massage away some of his pain. Steve had always been too proud to admit how his scoliosis made him ache. But those wide hands didn't stop finding their way onto his shoulders even after he became wide and broad himself and his spine straightened.  
> He hopes that he can be forgiven, though, for being more than a little startled at how he's found himself sitting at the feet of a man who's only recently come in from the cold after very nearly ending Steve's life with his shoulders being massaged, when Bucky could barely look him in the eye yesterday."  
> Aka Bucky's great at back rubs and Steve really does need one by now. Very easily a PWP, sorry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I take care of editing myself, so apologies for errors

Steve sat on Bucky’s bed and scooted back until he could put his shoulders against the wall. The muscles down his spine burned in reaction to a long day. Most days were long days for him. If the asthma didn’t do him in by the end of the school day, his spine or his joints would. Today, it was his spine. He opened the latest Famous Funnies comics, which he was almost positive Bucky didn’t pay to take out of the store. Bucky came up the stairs with a sandwich on a plate. It wasn’t the kind of sandwich they would have had five years ago – a few scraps of last night’s chicken, some crushed beans, and a little butter. Bucky cut the sandwich in half and handed one piece to him.

Steve set it back on the plate. “I’m not really hungry.” That was a lie, of course. They were always hungry, both of them. Bucky’s dad said it was a depression and everyone was hungry, but to Steve, it felt like it had always been this way.

“Don’t be stupid,” Bucky chastised. He cut the halves again and grabbed Steve’s wrist. He shoved the quarter sandwich into his hand and pushed it toward his face. Steve rolled his eyes, but he took a bite of the sandwich anyway. Even though the bread was hard and a few days old, it was still good. Better than dining on air, as his ma said. Bucky sat on his other side and they flipped through the comic together. Eventually Bucky handed him another quarter of the sandwich and Steve thought about refusing, but Bucky just shoved it at his face until he bit into it.

“You know,” Bucky said after Steve swallowed the last bite, “You’re gonna break your back holding the world up.”

Steve blinked at him. “What?”

“C’mere.” Bucky took the comic out of Steve’s lap and nudged him until he slipped off the bed to sit on the floor. Steve twisted around in confusion as Bucky’s legs bracketed his arms. Bucky pushed his chin back around with two fingers, and set his big hands on Steve’s shoulders. He didn’t touch Steve like he was a delicate thing that would fall apart, but like Bucky’s hands were always meant to be there. Steve stiffened in surprise, but Bucky’s thumbs pressed into the tight muscles on either side of his spine and Steve melted.

Steve ended up tilted forward so Bucky could knead further down his back, nearly asleep over his knees. Bucky patted him on the back to get him back on the bed, and they lay shoulder-to-shoulder with the comic held above them for the rest of the afternoon.

~*~

Steve curled over his drafting table. It was well past midnight and he had to be up at six for his first job. His eyes ached with the strain, but he stayed over the board with the charcoal held between his fingers. It was difficult to fit art classes in between the morning job at the fish market and the evening job at the grocery store, but it was worth the work.

Bucky’s bare feet shuffled across the wooden floor. “What’re you still doing up?”

“I need to finish this.”

Bucky stopped behind him and Steve sat up so he could see the drawing. It wasn’t his best, but realism wasn’t his forte. Bucky leaned against his shoulders and stroked a finger over the page. He smeared the charcoal across Steve’s nose. “You need to sleep, idiot.”

Steve wiped at the smudge with the back of his equally-smudged hand. He shifted to get up for a towel, but Bucky’s hands landed on his shoulders and held him to the chair. “Still breaking your back, I see,” he kneaded his fingers into Steve’s shoulders. After five years of rubbing the kinks out of Steve’s back, he knew where to put his thumbs.

Steve let out a low moan and leaned into his hands. “That’s not fair.”

“If you’re fighting fair, Steve, you’re not trying hard enough.” He found a knot and pressed into it. “I don’t suppose you want to come to bed?”

“I _really_ need to finish this,” Steve protested weakly.

“Well, I can just stay here until you finish it,” Bucky offered. He spoiled the offer by leaning down and setting his lips to the back of Steve’s neck. They kept the sofa made up in the unlikely event that someone visited them unexpectedly, but when Steve finally gave up the drafting table, he followed Bucky into the single room.

~*~

It didn’t change much after the serum, except in all the ways that it did. Three weeks after pulling Bucky off a Hydra table, they sat in the shattered ruins of a cathedral. They’d managed to carve out a modicum of privacy behind a fallen wall. It was also the first time they’d been alone since the Hydra base. Steve sat on the ground with his back to a column, jotting notes in his book by the paltry light of a shuttered lantern. It wasn’t a surprise when Bucky’s legs slid over his shoulders and pressed against his arms. He didn’t fit as easily between Bucky’s legs as he used to and Bucky’s hands didn’t feel so large on his shoulders anymore, but they were still warm and solid. He didn’t touch Steve like he was unbreakable, but as if they were always meant to fit together this way.

Steve leaned his head back to rest in Bucky’s lap. “ _I_ should be giving _you_ a shoulder rub,” he murmured.

“You get too big for your britches and suddenly my hands aren’t good enough for you anymore?” Bucky’s voice said he was teasing, but there was a shadow in his smile that made Steve frown.

He tipped his chin back to his chest. “Well, if you’re gonna do it, do it.”

Bucky’s grip tightened on Steve’s shoulders, thumbs digging into the hard muscles on either side of his spine. “I used to know every place your spine curved,” Bucky observed softly. “And now I’ve got to learn you all over again. How fair is that?”

Steve folded his notebook around the pencil and closed the lantern’s hood. He reached back and took Bucky’s left wrist, set his lips to it, and leaned into Bucky’s palm. “Keeps things interesting, doesn’t it?”

Bucky leaned over him and wrapped him up in a strong embrace. He nuzzled his face into Steve’s neck, lips and teeth nipping over the thick ropes of muscle. He slid his hands down Steve’s chest to his hips. They were quiet, but none of the Commandos would have said a word even if they weren’t.

~*~

Bucky sat still and quiet on the hotel bed, his back very straight, hands resting precisely on his thighs. Steve hovered uncertainly in the doorway. After more than a year spent tracking Bucky down, he didn’t know what to say to him or how to start. It was amazing to just see him, alive and unharmed; speaking seemed like too much to ask.

Bucky looked up at him after several minutes of Steve’s hovering. He looked more like _Bucky_ with his hair pulled away from his face. Steve wanted to suggest that he cut it, that maybe he’d feel more like himself he did. But Steve wasn’t sure who Bucky was under the Winter Soldier, and he wasn’t sure if Bucky knew either. Trying to force him to turn the clock back was too cruel, even for the most selfish of Steve’s fantasies.

“Still carryin’ the whole world on your shoulders, I guess,” Bucky said quietly. “They may have gotten bigger, but even you can’t carry all that weight, idiot.” He shifted to the edge of the bed and opened his legs wide. He patted the space between them. “C’mere.”

Steve’s feet moved on their own. He slid to his knees between Bucky’s legs and looked up at him, waiting.

“You’re facing the wrong direction,” Bucky pointed out.

Steve sat back and slowly turned around. He wedged his shoulders between Bucky’s knees and shuddered at the first touch of Bucky’s familiar hand on the back of his neck. He massaged Steve’s neck one-handed, and it took longer than it should have to realize Bucky wasn’t going to touch him with his left hand. Steve reached back and caught his metal hand. Bucky froze, but he let Steve pull his hand forward. Steve kissed the inside of wrist and nuzzled into his palm. The hand was warmer than he expected and just as smooth as it looked. He set it on his shoulder and pushed up into Bucky’s hands.

“After the last seventy years,” Steve confessed, “I could really use a massage.”

Bucky hesitantly closed his hands on Steve’s shoulders, testing the strength of his augmented left hand against the knots in Steve’s back. Steve let his breath out in an appreciative moan. He’d tried to get a professional massage at Tony’s insistence, but he couldn’t find anyone strong enough to do it, no one with the specific warmth of Bucky’s hands. Bucky grew more confident with each passing moment. The years stripped away between them, the entire world fading until Steve could have been fifteen again, seated between his best friend’s legs for the first time, or six months later when Bucky leaned over his head and kissed him upside-down, as matter-of-factly as if it was a normal thing between friends despite the awkward angle. Steve could track his entire life as points spent seated between Bucky’s feet.

Steve leaned his head back into his friend’s lap, looking up at his familiar, alien face. “I love you, Bucky,” he said softly, one of only a handful of times he’d said it out loud.

Bucky hesitated, hands going still. “You don’t know who I am anymore.” His left hand tightened. “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Steve put one hand up. “Hi, my name is Steve. It’s nice to meet you.”

A soft chuckle sounded from behind him. Bucky wrapped his hand around Steve’s and then curled over his head to kiss him, still awkward upside-down, still perfect. Like coming home.


	2. Amethyst

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: : With marriage equality finally spreading to Nevada, it was only a matter of time until a same-sex couple wound up accidentally married in Las Vagas. Steve and Bucky just never thought it would be them. To be fair, nobody else really expected it either, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're surprised."   
> If this includes drawing on each other's faces like Ross and Rachael I may love you forever.
> 
> A/N: I admit that I don’t know the Ross and Rachael reference (sorry!), but I hope this will suffice.

It started out with face paint. Bucky lay asleep on the couch in their Bellagio suite, one arm dangling off the side, the other thrown above his head; he looked so perfect that Steve couldn’t resist. Retrieving his latex paints and brushes, Steve perched on the coffee table across from his best friend. He sketched wings over Bucky’s eyes, bold black lines accentuating his cheekbones and curving over his jaw, traced the strong column of his throat and made a shrine to his collarbone. Steve meant to stop there, but he went back in with red and orange to light the angelic wings on fire, painted the corners of his eyes crimson, and the hollow of his throat cerulean. He swiped cool blues and greens under his clavicle, deep purple and gold beneath his brows, shaded in his cheeks in yellow, edged his lashes with white. Steve should have stopped there again, but he drew thick midnight waterfalls down Bucky’s torso and shaded in his abs to give them the appearance of rocky chasms. He put the moon over Bucky’s heart, and probably still wouldn’t have stopped if his brush hadn’t drifted over Bucky’s ticklish ribs and to make him jump.

Steve jerked away guiltily and looked at the mess he’d made of the coffee table and the couch. Dots of latex paint spattered the leather and pooled on the glass, his nicest jeans were speckled with red and gold, and his fingertips were muddy with a dozen colors. He met Bucky’s eyes sheepishly.

“Sorry. You fell asleep without your shirt on, so that makes you fair game.” Steve was never in a fraternity, but he was reasonably sure that was sound logic.

Bucky snorted indelicately, but he kept very still. “Finish what you started,” he said through barely parted lips, and closed his eyes once more. The paint there was dry and undamaged, but a corner of one feathered wing curled up from Bucky’s olive skin. Steve hesitated, fingers itching to repair the damage and complete the artwork, but his stomach gave a jerk and his pulse sounded loud in his ears. While Bucky slept, he was a perfect canvas in excellent light. Awake, breathing too-steadily, held too-still, he was _Bucky_ , Steve’s best friend and art manager.

“I don’t…” Steve started weakly.

Bucky slitted one eye, his brow twitching upward. “Don’t be chickenshit. I want a photo of this and I hate unfinished art.” He shifted slightly on the couch and Steve reached out automatically to still him, the fingers of one hand just barely resting on Bucky’s side. A smile curled over Bucky’s lips, but he relaxed into the couch and waited.

Drawing in a shaky breath, Steve picked up the brush again. He should have been out of inspiration after a long weekend of painting bodies for the show, but his brush moved fast and sure over Bucky’s skin, pulling out patterns and shadows that were already lurking just underneath. “Stay there,” he ordered, and left Bucky on the couch to retrieve his airbrush. Now that Bucky was awake, he could turn on the air compressor without fear. Bucky sat more still and patient than any of Steve’s models for the show, and didn’t complain when Steve painted over his lips or tickled his sides. Steve painted his friend a cybernetic left arm, and detailed a jagged line down his right side, deepened the colors on his face, and framed his jaw in deep black shadow. He might have gone on all night, but he lost the light and his hand started to cramp.

“I’ll get the camera.” Steve’s throat felt hoarse and dry, and he was conscious of Bucky looking at him through barely-open eyes, but Bucky didn’t move or protest. “You’re probably the best model I’ve ever had,” Steve informed him when he returned with the camera. He snapped a shot to test the focus, and then climbed on top of the table to get a view of Bucky’s body. “Can I…?” Steve stopped and peered at Bucky over the camera. He wouldn’t have hesitated if Bucky was one of his regular models, but this was his best friend.

“Out with it,” Bucky ordered.

“Can I open the button on your jeans?” Steve tried to stay professional about it, but he felt the blush coloring his cheeks, and was just glad Bucky’s eyes were still closed.

“Sure,” Bucky agreed blithely. Steve stepped off the table and hovered over Bucky’s hips. He swallowed hard, carefully slid the button out, and tugged the fabric open. The zipper slid down an inch on its own, and Steve hadn’t meant for it to, but it was already open and it showed a lovely slice of Bucky’s black boxers over his flat pelvis, the bare hint of a bulge just at the edge. Pulling it back up seemed even more invasive than leaving it open, so Steve lifted his hands away and climbed back onto the table. He really needed more light, his reflectors, a proper backdrop, but it worked in a raw, sharp way. He stepped off the table to close in on Bucky’s face, the sweep of his collarbone, the crease where his shoulder rotated. He knelt beside the couch for an angle of his ribs and chest, just catching the stubborn jut of his chin and the surprisingly long curve of his eyelashes. When the sun disappeared completely, Steve hastily took the shade off a lamp and set it on its side half a foot from Bucky’s ear. He snapped a dozen more shots before he realized that he’d kept Bucky in one position for hours and he had to be uncomfortable.

Steve cleared his throat. “All finished,” he managed. Bucky peeled one eye open and then rolled his spine. Despite declaring the all-clear, Steve snapped another shot, and then another as Bucky sat up, staring right into the camera – straight _through_ the camera, as if he could see Steve’s eyes through the lens.

“You were built for the camera,” Steve told him without thought as he clicked through the images on the display.

“Maybe I was just built for your brush,” Bucky replied, intensely serious in a way he rarely ever was with anyone, let alone Steve. Steve had no idea what to say in response, his stomach starting to flutter again, but Bucky saved him from answering by giving him a cocky smile and adding, “A body like mine needs to be cherished, Stevie.” He winked. “I couldn’t let just any jerkoff with a camera have it.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Let me peel that off of you so you can get in the shower.”

“No way, I want to see it.” He rolled up to his feet and sauntered off barefoot, not bothering to button his pants, and looking absurdly comfortable with it.

Flopping onto the abandoned couch, Steve continued to click through the pictures and burned with a strange jealous envy. Steve was small and skinny all the way through the eleventh grade, and then woke up one summer morning to realize that all of his pants were inches too short, and his shirts were getting tight across the shoulders. Over the course of nine months, he grew six inches and put on twenty pounds of muscle – spurred on by Bucky all but forcing him to take weight lifting as his elective, and shoving protein shakes at him several times a day. Steve went from being the smallest boy in their graduating class to being one of the largest, but he never really fit into his skin the way Bucky did. He’d outstripped Bucky in weight and height, but Bucky still took up more space than he did. More to the point, Bucky _owned_ the space he took up with nothing more taxing than a smile and a tilt to his hips. Steve tried to imagine himself sprawled out on the couch while someone painted on his skin, and couldn’t get past theoretically taking his shirt off.

“You better have gotten some damn good shots!” Bucky called from the bathroom. “I look fucking sexy. Can we go out like this?”

Steve opened his mouth several times like a landed fish, but he finally answered, “Well… it _is_ Vegas, so I guess so.”

“Sweet. Come help me pick out pants.”

Steve’s initial response was something along the lines of _I’m not your girlfriend_ , but what he actually said was, “Wear the ones you’ve got on. I designed around them and they’ve got paint on them anyway.”

“You owe me seventy bucks for that, by the way.” He appeared a moment later with his pants thankfully buttoned, wearing a pair of sleek brown leather shoes. “Want to spray my back down?”

The clock over the television read seven-pm. The Vegas nightlife wouldn’t start crawling out for another few hours, so Steve shrugged and picked up his airbrush gun. They were already going to have a bill for ruining the furniture, so why not mist down the rest of the room with silver paint? Continuing the same theme as the cybernetic arm, Steve made quick work of Bucky’s back, intentionally laying down a spatter of silver and black paint over the waistband of the jeans and down one leg.

“You’re going to be cleaning this out of your pores for months,” Steve warned, and flushed with pleasure when Bucky just hummed and said, “Worth it.”

~*~

Steve woke face-down with his left arm hanging off the bed. His stomach gave a surly twist and Steve groaned. He turned his face into the pillow, pulled his arm up on the bed to get some circulation back to his fingers, and curled up in a possibly-futile attempt to keep his stomach out of his throat. His mouth watered alarmingly and his fingers tingled, but he managed to make it a miserable five minutes without imminent vomiting and thought he might be safe. Just be sure, he stayed in the bed and tried to go back to sleep.

When he woke again, his stomach was still sour but not in outright rebellion. His head throbbed dully from dehydration, and his tongue tasted like death and felt like he’d licked a dozen cotton balls covered in honey. Moving slowly and staying hunched over, he made it to the bathroom to brush his teeth, drank straight from the tap and didn’t even care that it tasted vaguely of mildew. It wasn’t until he picked up a towel that he noticed his class ring was on the wrong hand. Steve squinted at it. It wasn’t just on the wrong hand, it was the wrong ring. His birthstone was ruby, _Bucky’s_ was amethyst. Somehow they must have gotten their rings swapped.

“Bucky!” he called as loudly as he dared with his head still feeling fragile on his neck. There was no response, so Steve forged back out of the bathroom. He found Bucky sprawled in his bed with a pillow over his face. His body paint peeled off his skin in ragged patches, giving him a slightly diseased aspect. Steve crawled back into the bed and gave some serious thought to waking his friend up or peeling off the rest of the paint, but it just seemed like too much effort. He crashed back to the mattress and followed Bucky’s example with the pillow over the eyes.

The sun was liquid gold behind the curtains when Steve woke a third time actually feeling like a human being. He nudged the pillow away from his face and gave his head a hesitant shake. He hadn’t been so hungover since the morning after his twenty-first birthday. “I’m way too old for this crap,” he muttered, dragging a hand down his face.

“What crap?” Bucky asked from the door, sounding annoyingly chipper. Steve instantly forgave him when he held out a bottle of cool water and package of Tylenol.

“I love you,” Steve said with heartfelt honestly as he dumped the capsules into his mouth and took a careful swallow of the water. It hit his stomach with a hollow swashing noise that made Steve wince. He reluctantly capped the bottle and stretched. “Why did we decide to get drunk?” he asked.

“Because it’s Vegas,” was Bucky’s predictable answer. He dropped onto the bed beside Steve, most of the paint peeled off, but still shirtless and barefoot. Steve looked away, startled and a little embarrassed to realize that he was developing a sincere fetish for Bucky’s bare feet. Bucky swiped his finger across the screen of his phone and held it up for Steve to see. “We’re trending,” he said proudly.

Steve squinted at the screen until his eyes accustomed to the bright glare. A photo of Bucky in his pristine paint with Steve’s arm around his waist greeted him. Steve zoomed in critically on the picture, already noticing the flaws where lines weren’t quite right and the shading could have been darker. “I remember this,” Steve said after a moment. “Not a whole lot else. What did we do last night?”

“We won a costume contest we didn’t sign up for,” Bucky reported gleefully, “And we were invited to join Tony Stark in his VIP room, where you got three and a half lap dances that made you go red to the hairline.”

Steve groaned, abruptly remembering the buxom redhead straddling his thighs while Steve did his best to look anywhere other than her breasts, and it was really hard because they were _right there_ , and they were actually very nice, and he was almost positive they were real. He remembered the girls cooing over his blush, a dark-haired man as the devil-incarnate in a garish candy apple red suit talking about… _something_ while Steve kept his hands behind his back and Bucky laughed.

“Did you get me a _patron_?” Steve asked, eyes widening as memory crept back in.

“Tell me again how much you love me,” Bucky said by way of confirmation, Cheshire cat grin sitting comfortable on his lips. “He put me on the phone with Pepper Potts last night and she wants to see your work first thing Monday.”

“ _Jesus_ , Bucky!”

“I know I work miracles, but that’s going a little far, Steve,” Bucky teased, but he looked insufferably pleased with himself. Steve didn’t know what to say; Tony Stark might be an irresponsible playboy billionaire, but he was also a well-known patron of the arts and had a collection that any artist would do many bad things to get a private viewing of, not even mentioning being displayed in.

Steve looked sideways at Bucky. “Please tell me I behaved myself,” he begged. He didn’t drink often – in fact, it was only the second time he’d been drunk enough to have difficulty remembering the previous night. The first time he was that drunk was the reason he didn’t drink often; apparently he was an amorous, cuddly, human-octopus when inebriated.

“I kept your hands off the new employer,” Bucky promised him. “Which took some doing, so you can thank me now.”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Steve breathed. The last thing in the world he needed was a tabloid picture of him clinging to Tony Stark and sucking on his neck. A fine shudder rippled down his spine and he caught sight of the ring again. “I think we got our rings mixed up.” He held his hand out for Bucky to take it back, and spied his own ring on Bucky’s left hand.

“Uh, well. About that.” Bucky cradled his left hand protectively, still partially painted, bits of silver latex sticking in patches to the back of his hand. He looked up at Steve through his lashes, his smile small and shy. “Do you remember Elvis?” he asked hesitantly.

Steve’s mind went blank for one blissful second and then he _did_ remember Elvis. He remembered the Devil standing on his left side, a tall black man in a military uniform standing to Bucky’s right and- _Elvis_. “Oh, God,” Steve whimpered, staring down at his left hand in horror. “We didn’t.”

Expression turning to a neutral mask, Bucky shrugged. “We did.”

“Bucky, I am so sorry. We can…” He blanched, stomach twisting again. “We can get an annulment, right?”

Bucky was quiet for a second, but he nodded. “I didn’t think you were so drunk you didn’t know what you were doing.” He shrugged again and scratched the back of his neck, obviously uncomfortable. “And neither of us was in any condition to have a wedding night.”

Brain finally catching up to Bucky’s body language, Steve asked, “Were _you_ too drunk to know what you were doing?” Though still hazy, Steve could remember Bucky pulling the fourth girl off his lap – an athletic brunette with a boyish body and stunning green eyes- and Steve, being so overcome with gratitude and just drunk enough not to mind his tongue, blurting out _marry me_. He remembered Bucky trying to laugh it off, but Steve grabbed his wrist and repeated, _marry me. I love you, Bucky, I always have._ He remembered Bucky staring down at him in wide-eyed shock but not disgust, and the Devil singing out, _legal in Nevada since last October!_

“No,” Bucky said softly. He straightened his spine. “I was cold sober, and I don’t regret it at all. Except maybe Elvis.” His eyes searched Steve’s face and he added, “But you weren’t sober and I shouldn’t have agreed to it. We can get an annulment on the grounds that you were intoxicated.”

Steve looked down at Bucky’s phone still in his lap. He tapped the browser to see half a dozen windows open, one labeled _annulment las vegas_. Steve set the phone down, reached across the space between them, and gently worked his class ring off Bucky’s finger. Bucky’s eyes drifted closed on a heartbreaking boarder of moisture. He nodded shakily and stood to leave, but Steve climbed backwards off the end of the bed to block him from escaping. He dropped to one knee and looked up at his friend.

“I owe it to you to do this right, Buck,” Steve said nervously. “You’re my best friend and I can’t imagine not having you next to me for the rest of my life. Marry me?”

Bucky just stood staring down at him, chest heaving in deep breaths for so long that Steve worried he’d misread everything and was about to be rejected by someone he was technically already married to. Bucky held out his left hand once more and Steve pushed the ring back on, stomach twisting with relief. He thought it might need to be resized, just a touch too large on Bucky’s ring finger.

“Ever take this off my hand again and we’re going to fight,” Bucky warned, but he slid down to his knees, took Steve’s face between his hands, and kissed him firmly on the mouth. “Yes, you idiot.”

“Don’t call me an idiot, jerk,” Steve responded by rote. His eyes burned and he blinked rapidly to keep from doing anything even _more_ embarrassing, like bursting into happy sobs.

“Don’t do stupid things then,” Bucky answered. He kissed Steve again, not seeming to notice or care that Steve’s mouth tasted like morning against the cool mint of Bucky’s tongue. “My mom is going to kill us for not having a real wedding.”

“So we’ll do it again,” Steve said, unable to stop the grin slicing across his mouth. Laughter boiled up in his chest and he kissed Bucky again to keep it down. “Without Elvis this time.”

Bucky grinned. “Think you’ll get Tony Stark to stand up for you twice?”

“You’re the persuasive one,” Steve said, peppering kisses down Bucky’s neck, “You do it.” Bucky tasted like latex and soap, but Steve wasn’t complaining. He didn’t realize how much he wanted Bucky’s skin under his mouth until that moment, and he didn’t think he would ever get enough of the taste. He rubbed a patch of black latex off Bucky’s shoulder and dragged his tongue over the revealed skin, giddy with finally, _finally_ being able to touch.

“Come shower with me,” Bucky said after a long moment of letting Steve explore his body with fingertips and lips. Steve murmured something he thought sounded like agreement, and Bucky laughed at him, ruffling his hair. “Up. Come on,”

Steve had some vague idea in the back of his head that he wanted their first time to be in a bed, and _Jesus_ , how could they be in their thirties and still have ‘first times’ left after more than twenty years of friendship-closer-than-friendship? It seemed insane. But when Bucky pushed him up against the shower wall and dropped to his knees at Steve’s feet, Steve couldn’t think of it as a first time. It should have been a monumental step in their relationship, but there was nothing stilted, or awkward, or fumbling about it. If he didn’t know better, he would swear they’d been here a thousand times before, Steve gasping and whining as he searched for a handhold on the tile, Bucky pinning his hips to the wall when he tried to lift onto his toes, the water plastering Bucky’s hair to his head and running over his face in tantalizing rivers. Steve shuddered and jerked in helpless spasms as he came, and Bucky helped him sit on the floor while his vision was still gray.

“Help me scrub this off,” Bucky said once Steve cobbled together enough of his mind to look alert, “And then take me to bed, Steve.”

As it happened they didn’t quite make it to the bed, but sex on a mattress of plush terrycloth towels was not a bad way to start life as a married man. 


End file.
